Burnett - In such good company: eleven years of laughter, mayhem, and fun in the sandbox

I recently had the extreme pleasure of receiving the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, and in accepting the honor I talked about how much I loved going to the movies with my grandmother, Nanny, as a kid. My favorites were the comedies and the musicals. I think thats when I fell in love with the idea of, someday, being a musical comedy performer. Since there wasnt television back in the covered wagon days, when I was growing up, I never imagined that my dream would be realized by having my own weekly musical comedy variety show on the small screen. But thats exactly what happened.

Ive been thinking about that time a lot, and since my memory is pretty good, I decided to put my thoughts down on paper for anybody who might be interested in what we did and how we did it.

In doing the research for this book, I watched all 276 shows, even though at times I felt like Norma Desmond watching herself on the screen in Sunset Boulevard!

When I was watching the first few episodes, the first thing I noticed was how I looked. I laughed out loud at my various hairdos, with different shades of red, remembering that I (amateurishly) dyed my hair myself every week using Miss Clairol, because I hated to waste my time sitting in a beauty parlor.

What really stand out are the changes that evolved. Of course the hairstyles, makeup, and costumes were constantly changing. Remember, this was the late sixties into the seventiesbell-bottoms, miniskirts, etc. The makeup was exaggeratedheavy eyeliner and large Minnie Mouse false eyelashesupper and lower! Even Bob Mackie, our brilliant costume designer, who surprised us every week with his creations, both beautiful and comedic, would admit that he missed the mark on some occasions. But they were rare.

One of the things I noticed was how I evolved over those eleven years. I went from the zany, kooky, man-hungry, big-mouthed goofball, which was who I had fashioned myself into during my early years, including my time as a regular on the Garry Moore television show, into a somewhat more mature kook.

I always loved doing the physical comedyfalling down, jumping out of windows, getting pies in the facehowever, around thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old, three or four years into the show, I found myself enjoying tackling more sophisticated and complex satires and some of the sketches that had a tinge of pathos. The Family scenes with Eunice, Mama, and Ed always touched me deeply, because as crazy as they could get, there was always an element of realitythese were people suffering disappointment and regret, raging against fate, doing the best they could.

Naturally, there were a lot of sketches and musical numbers I had completely forgotten. Some of them made me laugh, and some, I admit, made me cringe! But overall, I was transported back to the most wonderful and pleasurable phase of my career.

What follows are many outstanding memories of what occurred during a regular show week. Ill share anecdotes about our cast members, many of our guests, recurring characters, favorite movie parodies, some of the funny and off-the-cuff questions from our audience and my responsesbasically how we all played together in the sandboxhilariouslyfrom 1967 to 1978.

Some of these stories may be familiar to those of you who know me best, but they needed to be retold in order to give you the whole picture of those eleven wonderful years!

But Im getting ahead of myself. Let me start over at the very beginning

When I was growing up, theater and music were my first loves, so my original show business goals revolved around being in musical comedies on Broadway, like Ethel Merman and Mary Martin. My stage break came in the spring of 1959, when I was cast as Winnifred the Woebegone in the musical comedy Once Upon a Mattress, a takeoff on Hans Christian Andersens fairy tale The Princess and the Pea. It was an Off-Broadway production at the Phoenix Theatre, directed by none other than the iconic George Abbott, Mr. Broadway himself!

The show was originally scheduled for a limited run of six weeks, but it was so popular that it was moved to Broadway and ran for over a year. I got my wish; I was on Broadway! Because no one had expected the production to be so successful, there were numerous booking issues that caused our little show to be bounced from theater to theaterfrom the Phoenix to the Alvin to the Winter Garden to the Cort and, finally, to the St. James. There were a couple of jokes going around the business about the production during this period. I remember Neil Simon quipped, Its the most moving musical on Broadway! If you havent seen Once Upon a Mattress yet, dont worry, itll soon be at your neighborhood theater.

My second big break came in the fall of 1959 when I was asked to be a regular performer on The Garry Moore Show, a terrifically popular TV comedy-variety series. For almost a year, until the summer of 1960, I doubled up and did both shows. I would perform in Mattress on Tuesdays through Fridays at 8:30 p.m. and then do two shows a day on Saturdays and Sundays.

I would rehearse for Garrys show eight to nine hours a day Monday through Friday, and then we would tape his show on Friday, in the early evening, which gave me just enough time to hop the subway and head downtown to arrive at Mattress in time for the 8:30 curtain!

I had no days off. Hey, I was young, I told myselfbut evidently not that young, because one Sunday, during a matinee, I fell asleepin front of the audience!

Normally, the scene involved Princess Winnifred trying her best to get a good nights sleep on top of twenty mattresses, but she couldnt. The mattresses were highly uncomfortable and lumpy, resulting in a very active pantomime in which I jumped up and down, pounding on the offending lumps, and finally wound up sitting on the edge of the bed wide awake, desperately counting sheep as the scene ended. Not this Sunday. As I lay there on top of twenty mattresses, I simply drifted off to dreamland. Our stage manager, who was in the wings, called, Carol? And then louder, Carol! I woke up with a start and nearly fell off the very tall bed. The audience howled, but the producers changed the schedule after that and moved the Sunday performance to Monday, so I could have Sundays off.